John Niedermeyer is a Brooklyn-based design manager and internets enthusiast at <a href="http://buzzfeed.com">BuzzFeed</a>. Previously, he was a digital designer and editor at <a href="http://nytimes.com">The New York Times</a>.

Take Sein­feld, add the visu­al style of 24, and you get Watch­ing Ellie. That damn clock in the bot­tom cor­ner of the screen is point­less– it just makes me ner­vous as Ellie bum­bles her was through her day. scratch that– through her 22 min­utes. The writ­ing isn’t so bad, and the char­ac­ters are all good (with the excep­tion of the blonde eng­lish boyfriend)… I espe­cial­ly liked her build­ing super, played by Peter Stor­mare (one of the nihilists from the Big Lebows­ki).

So, what’s with the real-time stuff? Are we so neu­rot­ic a cul­ture that we find this kind of thing inter­est­ing? One of the rea­sons i like Frasi­er so much, is because of the way they tran­si­tion between scenes. It gives a sec­ond to catch our breath, muse over what­ev­er clever title they give the next scene, and then we see it unfold. Sit­coms are stale, i real­ize this– but Watch­ing Ellie isn’t more than an exper­i­ment. I doubt it will catch on with­out some rethink­ing.